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Notes:

Sirens screaming and lights flashing, a New York City ambulance speeds through the night. Its drivers are paramedics working the graveyard shift -- men who come face-to-face with the dead and the dying on a daily basis. Burnt out from one too many nights on the job, they are nearly as broken as the bodies they haul through the streets.

Drama Thriller - Even loyal Nicolas Cage and Martin Scorsese fans may find themselves
disappointed with this stylish but meandering drama. Its serious
tone and subject matter will mostly appeal to older adults, and the
film's gory content and strong language make it inappropriate for
children.

PROFANITY: Frequent use of strong profanity.SEX/NUDITY: NoneVIOLENCE: Very severe beatings.DRUGS/ALCOHOL: Frequent drug and alcohol use.ACTION: A big ambulance crash.COMEDY: A comic line or two to ease the tension.

There's an interesting movie about a paramedic struggling to come to grips with a past trauma through a flurry of destructive chemical indulgences, but Martin Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead is not the one I have in mind: it's Broken Vessels, a similarly-themed low-budget indie that received a very limited theatrical run earlier this year. This is not to say that Scorsese's slicker studio effort does not feature its share of virtues--in fact, there are many--but, to use a tired cliché, its whole amounts to less than the sum of its often exceptional parts.

Sirens screaming and lights flashing, a New York City
ambulance speeds through the night. Its drivers are paramedics working the
graveyard shift -- men who come face-to-face with the dead and the dying on a
daily basis. Burnt out from one too many nights on the job, they are nearly as
broken as the bodies they haul through the streets. What keeps them going is
their caustic sense of comedy, and an acrid view of a world which seems to have
its surreal epicenter in Manhattan.

Nicolas Cage plays EMS paramedic Frank Pierce. It is
the early 1990's and New York has not yet undergone its renaissance of recent
years. Surrounded by the injured and the dying, Frank is dwelling in an urban
night-world, crumbling under the accumulated weight of too many years of saving
and losing lives. The film follows Frank over the course of fifty-six hours in
his life - two days and three nights on the job - as he reaches the very brink
of spiritual collapse and redemption.